Many years ago, back in the 1990s, before the “Baptist Manifesto” of 1997, I was standing in a College Theology Society (CTS) cafeteria line with Curtis Freeman and a group from the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion (NABPR) Region at Large.Footnote 16 We were meeting together. “Curtis,” I asked, “What kind of a Baptist are you?” “Bill,” he replied, in a Texas drawl I cannot imitate, “we are the catholic Baptists.” I am almost certain he said “we” and that he meant “catholic” with a small c. As a student of American religious history, I was not sure what to make of “catholic Baptists.”
Over the years since then, I have had the good fortune at Dayton to teach Baptist students who graduated from Truett Seminary at Baylor University. Though the name carries too much baggage for many of them to want to own it, they have greatly enriched my sense of who “catholic Baptists” might be. Having studied a curriculum based on Christian classics from the Apostolic Fathers to the Moderns, they are among the best-prepared doctoral students I have taught. At a recent dissertation defense, one of them explained that when he read the Fathers, Medievals, and Reformers, he felt like he was part of them and of their history. And yet reigning ecclesiologies failed to account for his part with them. In the book, Freeman refers to those who find themselves in such an ecclesial situation as “Other Baptists.”
One of the pleasures of reading Contesting Catholicity was meeting the Dixeland liberal Carlyle Marney. Freeman cites Marney's 1961 address to the Pastors’ Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention: “What if that holy feeling of affection we have known for men [sic] behind other fences is real and we are truly brothers? What if our nearness is something we may sin against and deny, but cannot divide? What if the oneness of faith is the oneness of the body that is Christ?” (259–60). For Freeman, as for Marney, these three questions are rhetorical and the answer to each is yes. Contesting Catholicity is a brilliant and sustained ecclesiological account, desiring to keep faith with both Freeman's Baptist forebears and the wider church catholic, of how the answer to all three of Marney's questions can be yes.
As the subtitle Theology for Other Baptists indicates, Freeman primarily addresses Contesting Catholicity to fellow Baptists. Its publication last year, however, was also an ecumenical event, a major contribution to “receptive ecumenism” (270–71), in which Freeman challenges fellow Christians to recognize the gifts they might receive from Baptists. He divides the book into two parts. The first part, “Sickness unto Death,” locates historically and culturally the pilgrim posture from which Freeman carries out part 2's constructive ecclesiological work. A work of Baptist ressourcement, part 2 treats in six chapters the central theological themes Freeman wishes to retrieve from the Baptist heritage and hold up for recognition by both contemporary Baptists and the rest of the church catholic.
Freeman does not speak of church catholic lightly. As a participant in the dialogue between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church, he is a well-informed interlocutor who understands Catholic ecclesiology well enough not only to work with its sometimes arcane sources but also to challenge it.Footnote 17 He provides an extended commentary on the est-subsistit in argument regarding paragraph 8 of Lumen Gentium (248–57). This paragraph concludes with Saint Augustine's likening the church to “a pilgrim in a foreign land.” Those who disagree with Freeman will have a very clear idea of what he understands by church catholic and the warrants for that understanding. This is “contesting catholicity.”
Part 2's first five chapters deal respectively with the Trinity, baptismal priesthood, gathered church ecclesiology, the practice of reading Scripture in community for further light, and evangelical sacramentalism. He saves the thorny issue of incommensurable accounts of baptism for the last chapter, “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.” It is his most effective test of “whether a return to the sources may provide a way to be both Baptist and catholic” (343). His hope is that both contemporary Baptists and the rest of the church catholic “might find a way to affirm believer's baptism by immersion not as a Baptist distinctive but as a catholic practice maintained by Baptists in hope that one day it will be fully received within the one holy church” (264). He asks Baptists to look around and consider that perhaps their witness has borne fruit in signs of true Christian baptism in the rest of the church (368).
Freeman writes from a postdenominational posture in many ways inseparable from the story of his own life. He describes himself as a pilgrim seeking in the wider catholic tradition sustenance for “the ecclesial pilgrimage through the wilderness of life after Christendom” (257). Freeman aims to historicize what he sees as the sectarian posture of contemporary Baptists in the United States. He wants to show the early Baptists not as “fanatical sectarians” but rather as “churchly minded Christians seeking radical reform of the church catholic by reinstating apostolic practices that serve as identifying marks of the new creation on its way” (15) and to understand their vision “as a movement of radical renewal within the church catholic rather than purely a faction of dissent and separation” (241). He describes his effort as “a theologically constructive narrative of a contesting catholicity based on a retrieval of sources from the Baptist heritage and in conversation with the wider church.” This is not, he continues, an effort to show “who the real Baptists are or were, but rather an attempt to imagine how Baptists might understand themselves in continuity with historic Christianity” (18).
In this work of retrieval, Freeman considers himself the heir of “liberal southerners” such as Carlyle Marney, and more proximately, James William McClendon Jr. In the aftershock of a denomination split between fundamentalists and liberals, he speaks of “recovering Baptists,” “exiles from the southern denominational diaspora” (x) in an “ongoing story of recovering from liberalism” (xi). At the end, he describes the book as “only the thoughts of one Other Baptist seeking recovery from the habits of life and mind that have shaped (and continue to shape) his life” (392).
In his imagining early Baptists as a radical reform movement in the church catholic and in continuity with historic Christianity, Freeman borrows consciously from the Lutheran movement of “evangelical Catholics,” most closely associated with the names of Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson. He appeals at the outset to Braaten's suggestion, in a review of volume 2 of McClendon's Systematic Theology, that, in an ecumenical age, Baptists might best understand themselves as “representative of a spiritual movement within the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, rather than, as the radical reformers claimed, a rebirth of the church of the New Testament” (10). In concluding the book, he returns again to Braaten's lament at the beginning of Vatican II, that “while Catholics did not understand the necessity of the Reformation, Protestants did not understand its tragedy” (387). He makes his own Braaten's claim that Protestant Reformers “aimed to reform a church that lived in continuity with the church the Creed calls ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic’” (388). Freeman writes as a Christian who is painfully aware of both the Reformation's necessity and its tragic ending in denominationalism.
As they have adversely affected ecumenism generally, denominational branding concerns have made identifying as a reform movement with the church catholic a difficult posture for the “evangelical Catholic” Lutherans to sustain within their own denomination. One thinks of Richard Neuhaus, Robert Wilken, Bruce Marshall, and Michael Root. Each began his ecclesial pilgrimage as an “evangelical Catholic” Lutheran and ended as a Catholic. It is fair to ask whether it will be any easier for Freeman's Other Baptists.
As a postdenominational Christian, Freeman knows that there can only be one church. “Either the church is one,” he declares, “or it is no church at all” (260). On a landscape of incommensurable denominational ecclesiologies, we are left with Marney's rhetorical question: “What if that holy feeling of affection we have known for men behind other fences is real and we are truly brothers?” In a divided church, how do we give a theological account of this holy feeling? Karl Barth referred to this division as the “enigmatic rift” (Riss) or “puzzling crack.” In Saving Karl Barth, his 2014 study of Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, D. Stephen Long describes theology as the “practice of friendship.” His book is a dramatic historical-theological account of Balthasar and Barth practicing theology as friendship at the edges of the “enigmatic rift.” Interestingly, believer's baptism was one issue over which they drew closer after many years. Balthasar eventually understood infant baptism as “the most momentous decision of all church history,” which, in Long's words, collapsed “the personal subjective mission into the objective elements of sacrament and office.”Footnote 18 Barth subsequently judged the acceptance of infant baptism by Luther and Calvin as inconsistent with their insistence on faith as indispensable for baptism and their rejection of “implicit faith.”Footnote 19 The considerations on baptismal practice in Freeman's chapter 9 make a fascinating beginning to reflecting on what to do with such conclusions.
If theology is indeed a practice of friendship, and I am sure it is, it remains for me to respond in a spirit of contesting catholicity to Freeman's work. The most serious challenge I take from it has to do with what he calls the “the conquest narrative that has become synonymous with Christendom,” the “grand delusion of majority consciousness” (391), linked with the Christendom ideal, rejected, along with its intimate connection to violent coercion, by radical reformers and early Baptists such as Roger Williams. In a cultural milieu where Catholic bishops and other Christians seek, against clear popular consensus, to have certain biblical or Catholic natural law teachings established as law in the United States, the historic Baptist resistance to religious coercion gains importance. The Christendom ideal might also have something to do with a general lack in modern Catholic theology of the kind of theological modesty Freeman describes at the end of chapter 7 on the practice of reading Scripture in patient expectation of further light.
Two critical final comments concern the role of bishops and the postliberal theological underpinnings of Freeman's ecclesiology. In chapter 6, on the ecclesiology of the gathered church, Freeman identifies Baptists’ “most pressing ecclesiological challenge” as lying “in learning how to show that these gatherings are related to the church as the whole people of God” (271). He is surely right to insist that this communion is “grounded in communion with the triune God” (271). Long before Christendom, however, local bishops were the clearest signs of this communion. He does note that Baptists might welcome episcopal succession as a sign of apostolicity but not as a necessary condition for valid apostolic ministry and gifts (269). Earlier he insists against opponents of the historic creeds that since the “canon of Scripture and the creeds of the church developed together, neither can be grasped without reference to the other” (134). But the role of bishops was developing at the same time. Is it as easy to distinguish a sign and a condition of valid apostolic ministry as Freeman's distinction suggests? Does it make sense to have an episcopal sign, even one that is not a condition for apostolic ministry, that does not do anything?
My final comment about the Yale School's narrative retrieval and its development by McClendon will be difficult to articulate because it is more a matter of instinctive response than of considered argument. Nevertheless, I venture this last comment because such matters are deeply relevant to ecumenical conversation. I understand the indispensable work the Yale School of postliberal theology, associated with the names of George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, does behind Freeman's narrative of ongoing recovery from individualism and theological liberalism.
James William McClendon Jr. has an even more important proximate role in this story. I must say at the outset that it was not from any of my teachers but from McClendon's intervention in an American Academy of Religion session that I first learned how, in Corpus Mysticum (1949), Henri de Lubac pointed to the strange medieval reversal whereby the Eucharist replaced the church as verum corpus and the church replaced the Eucharist as corpus mysticum. Freeman wisely points to the possibilities this suggests for sacramental dialogue between Baptists and Catholics (339 n. 32). To McClendon as well, along with Terrence Tilley, belongs the major credit for bringing the CTS and the NABPR Region at Large together.
Nevertheless, I must confess to an instinctive aversion to what strikes me as a narrative formalism in Lindbeck et al., a lack of attention to the historical distance and specificity I associate with interpretation. I am not just talking about historical critical interpretation but also, for example, about history of interpretation, history of effects, and tradition history. Cultural-linguistic formalism turns everything into words in a way that seems to privilege word over event rather than understanding them together. The recovery of narrative meaning by the Yale School leads Freeman in chapter 7 to a discussion of McClendon's “this is that” sense of mystical immediacy in the reading of Scripture (288–94). I understand “this is that,” but my particular religious sensibility expects to find such mystical immediacy in rite rather than in text apart from rite.
Perhaps my concern is best conveyed by Lindbeck's overly discussed example of the Crusader proclaiming “Jesus is Lord” as he cleaves an “infidel's” skull (Freeman, 42). Every time I teach The Nature of Doctrine, all the Protestant students find it obvious that the Crusader's claim is false. To all the Catholic students, the claim is clearly true, but the Crusader does not really get it. I realize that Lindbeck is talking about three different kinds of truth and the Crusader exemplifies only one, embodied or performative truth. I would still prefer to say that the Crusader's claim is obviously true but that the Crusader himself is engaged in a performative contradiction.
This uneasiness with narrative approaches spills over into discussion of word and sacrament, their relation, and issues such as the question of whether the contentious phrase ex opere operato is magical and superstitious, or an anti-Donatist affirmation of God's promise to be present and offer grace in and through water or bread and wine. In this connection, how appropriate the quote from William Kiffen's Sober Discourse on page 319 to the effect that anyone who “cares not for Christ in the Word, Christ in the Promise, Christ in the Minister, Christ in the Water, Christ in the Bread and Wine, Christ Sacramental; cares as little for Christ God, Christ Flesh, Christ Emmanuel,” adding that, “by these he comes near.” In the margin, I wrote: “Go Kiffen!” Perhaps all I want to say is that I grant the internal coherence of Lindbeck's three senses of truth, and I understand the role his work has played in overcoming the liberal-fundamentalist impasse, but that his appeal to those with Catholic sensibilities is limited. I suspect that here we are dealing with visceral differences of religious sensibility that cannot be resolved in theory but must be lived through together.
Having discharged my obligations as a contending catholic, I do not wish to conclude my response to a book I enjoyed so much on a contentious note. Freeman's frequent recourse to Bunyan's image of the pilgrim and our pilgrim journey reminded me of a bluegrass song by Bill Monroe (I heard it on The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album in Chris Hillman's arrangement) called “I Am a Pilgrim.” “Catholicity,” Freeman writes, “is that toward which the church in pilgrimage is always moving” (247). Wholeness or the fullness of catholicity is an eschatological anticipation. “I'm going down to that River of Jordan,” Hillman sings, “just to bathe my wearisome soul. If I could just touch the hem of his garment, good Lord, then I know. . . he'd make me whole.” Contesting Catholicity is a mighty, grace-filled reach for the hem of his garment. May we touch it, and may it make us whole.
